Thursday, April 14. 2011

The idea behind this skyscraper proposal is to harvest the energy within clouds in regions where more than 200 days per year are cloudy and rainy such as Scotland, North western United States, and South American rain forests.

According to studies, a single lightning produces comparable energy to 100,000 household bulbs for an hour. It is estimated that the world’s population currently needs 14 trillion of kilowatts per year but almost 33% of the electricity is lost during its distribution.

The Cloud and Electricity Generator Skyscraper seeks to tackle these problems by collecting the cloud’s electricity at heights that surpass more than 1 kilometer. The skyscraper is designed with a series of super-tall antennas that collect lightning and stores the energy in a series of battery-like structures distributed along the entire building.

A series of these skyscrapers could provide enough clean energy to a medium-size city. There will be very little energy lost in its distribution as the skyscraper will be located within the cities.

Thursday, March 03. 2011

Finnish design team, ALA Architects has shared with us their latest commission, a mixed use project in Helsinki, Cloud City. Seeking to take advantage of available space within the urban core, this unique project brings density to a underutilized courtyard within a large existing factory block. Additional images, including a full set of detailed floor plans and a description by the architects after the break.

Courtesy ALA Architects

Helsinki is currently developing new sustainable methods for building the city. Primarily these projects aim at increasing density at the expense of urban sprawl. One question is how to make existing built areas denser, another where and how to build high risers. The Cloud City project is one possible answer.

Courtesy ALA Architects

This project aims at increasing diversity in the central design quarters of Punavuori. As its site, it uses the large courtyard of the 1930’s Nokia cable factory block, Merikortteli. It aims at combining a single family house typology with central location and high rise views. This is achieved by using an office tower to elevate the residential building above the surrounding ridge line. The building is literally two different architectures piled on top of each other. These two identities are never present simultaneously so they can be completely optimized for their own use and conditions. Both sections have adopted a type of camouflage relating to their specific situations.

Courtesy ALA Architects

The lower office section has a façade literally reflecting the surrounding brick walls, becoming a distorted reflection of its container. Its form and reflective facade direct additional light into the yard in the winter, while in the summer it provides shade against overheating.

Courtesy ALA Architects

The apartments above are made up of one room sized units, creating a small scale, detached house feel. The private terraces and greenhouses give a sense of having your own garden. Each apartment has magnificent views to the sea and across central Helsinki. On the city scale the pixelated shape, lined by reflective glass railings and conservatories, makes the building blend into the skyline.

Courtesy ALA Architects

The courtyard will be built into a lush green garden, which receives its sunlight evened out by the reflective façade of the new office building. The ground level contains public functions, spilling out through the large arcades.

Above the ridgeline Cloud City has recreated the intimate scale of the old wooden houses which used to inhabit the site, whilst renewing the courtyard below into a surreal playground for the design district.

From a field of 237 entries from 25 countries, London’s Cook Robotham Architecture Bureau will receive the $ 65,000 second prize for a tower that is based upon the growing of algae in layers of droplets.

THE TOWER OF DROPLETS
The entire tower is inspired by the creation of energy. Living energy which must be……… Visible living energy SYMBOLISING THE VISIBLE ENERGY, ENTERPRISE AND INVENTIVE OPTIMISM OF THE TAIWANESE PEOPLE. The droplets are the primary elements of this process. Their activity, presence and form resonate throughout the scheme.

Much of the tower is open to the public to view the processes at close quarters. Even from the lifts, the daily state of vegetable husbandry will be visible. A variety of different arrangements of plantation and localized environment are distributed over its length. The principal purpose of the tower is to CREATE ALGAE.

When watered and filtered the algae create BIOMASS used as food for fish and plants and for making paper and BIOFUEL for powering engines. This process takes CO2 (a known hazard in Taiwan) out of the environment.

In the basic tower we provide 10.888 M2 surface of algae which produces 3,266,400 liters of oil and produces several thousand tons of biomass in a year. The same structure could be further developed – with accumulated Income and more bags to a maximum of double the surface and thus creating 6,532,800 liters of oil.

The structure is a series of steel lattices that wind around the steel elevator cores. The droplets are steel cages with membrane skinning. There are 3 observation levels:

There are 3 office zones, all are used by the City development Authority. THE MUSEUM at the base of the tower contains 5 floors On its top are viewable algae systems. At middle levels are exhibition zones based of techniques developed by the authors at the Kunsthaus Graz (Austria) and the War Museum of the North.

Tuesday, October 19. 2010

Dr. Dickson Despommier, a former professor at Columbia University and champion of vertical farming, has released a new book on The Vertical Farm Project. The book puts forth his argument about the future of urban agriculture through vertical farms.

The video below shows Despommier introducing his ideas about vertical farms as a "closed loop agricultural cycle" that provides safe food and water to growing urban population:

See these stories in the Worldchanging archives for more on the worldchanging potential of vertical farms, an actual small scale application, and some of the criticism the concept must address to really be brought to scale:

Since moving into the Los Angles half-way house two years ago, residents of the Rainbow Apartments have been devising a plan to start their own urban garden. After a few trials and errors, the novice gardeners have now succeeded in creating a 34-foot-long plot bursting with strawberries, tomatoes, basil and other herbs and vegetables, which grow vertically against their cinder block building. ¶ In addition to providing them with fresh, nutritious food, the residents have found that the garden has given them a way to connect with each other and build a supportive community...

Columbia Professor Dickson Despommier has generated a fair amount of attention with his concept for "vertical farms," stacked, self-contained urban biosystems that would -- theoretically -- supply fresh produce for city residents year round. The New York Times showcased outlandish artists' conceptions of what such farms might look like. Colbert did his shtick. Twelve pilot projects are supposedly under consideration, in locations as far-flung as China and Dubai. ¶ The concept has captured the imagination of at least the sliver of the public (including the editors at Worldchanging), who laments the enormous resource demands of our food production system and yearns for something easier on the land, easier on our aquifers, and less demanding of fossil fuels. Vertical farms seem to promise all that. ¶ Promising, of course, is different than delivering. Construction requires a lot of energy. Keeping vegetables warm in winter requires a lot of energy. Recycling water requires a lot of energy. Generating artificial sunlight requires a lot of energy. In other words, the secret ingredient that makes vertical farms work (assuming they work at all) is boatloads of energy. No one seems to have actually done the math on the monetary and environmental costs of such a scheme, but they would no doubt be considerable. ¶ Perhaps those costs pencil out (although they almost certainly do not), but the plausibility of the idea itself is in some ways beside the point. Whatever the merits of vertical farms, the enthusiasm with which this idea has been received suggests that we're becoming mightily reductive in the way that we think about sustainability...

...to focus on just one technology, let's look at the potential impact of vertical farming. ¶ There's a great site introducing the concept called, logically enough, the vertical farm project. This site will give you an extensive introduction to the idea of doing intensive hydroponics agriculture in urban hi-rises, and it includes a lot of architectural plans, systems analyses and hard numbers. Cost is somewhat skirted-around, but doesn't appear to be prohibitive when you factor in the fertilizer, pesticide, transportation and storage costs of our current mode of production. ¶ It seems crazy to talk about farming in a hi-rise; the vision it gives rise to is of a kind of student-residence crammed with pot-smoking hippies who've traded their carpets for wheat. In fact, the approach is pretty hard-nosed and industrial, with very high outputs as its aim. And here's where it gets interesting from the point of view of our ambition to rewild the country: in the study entitled "Feeding 50,000 People, Anisa Buck, Stacy Goldberg and others conclude that a single building covering one city block, and up to 48 stories high depending on the design, can grow enough food to sustain 50,000 people. This calculation doesn't require any magical technology; there's no fairy-dust being evoked here, we could build such a structure now. ¶ So, let's do the math...

It's hard to tire of projects that involve wallpapering, paneling, and roofing urban structures with plant life. Though it's becoming a more common design approach for enhancing air quality, catching runoff, highlighting the "green" aspects of a building, and sometimes even providing food, it always has an unexpected effect, accustomed as we are to surfaces made with impermeable and dull materials...[the concept of vertical farming] had a recent update in New York Magazine.Since we discussed the concept, developed by Dickson Despommier, who teaches environmental science and microbiology at Columbia, a whole lot more people are on board with the climate change issue. So his proposal to put agriculture into skyscrapers and reallocate land to forests in the interested of sequestering carbon and slowing global warming now has the attention of more than just design junkies and eco-imagineers. It's become an attractive possibility to venture capitalists from all over the world. The idea factors in not only the climate aspect, but also impending population explosions, looking at taking food cultivation upwards instead of outwards as it grows to accommodate greater numbers of people .

On an urban planet, closing urban resource and energy loops -- creating zero-waste systems for meeting the needs of people who live in highly dense cities -- floats in front of us, grail-like, as a goal. ¶ No one quite knows how to get it done, yet. But more and more interesting pieces of the puzzle are piling up, like smart places, smart grids and product service systems...Here's another piece of the puzzle -- vertical farming:...it's a provocative idea, and might fit together with some of the innovations discussed above in novel and worldchanging ways.

fabric | rblg

This blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research.

We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings.

Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations.

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